It's a total nothing movie but if you like good acting, engaging line reads, constantly clever and absurd uses of lighting and the artifice of a sound stage, it's a pretty wild and quick 90 minutes. If they'd had tried to sell this movie even a little I think it could've been a small success, but it was filmed in 2016 and sent out to die on VOD among a flood of negative reviews in 2018 so maybe I'm wrong. I wrote a bit about it for my own memory if I could try to sell anyone a bit harder on it:


Someone had the bright idea to weld Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels to The Seventh Seal and pretend it was directed by Nicolas Winding-Refn had he been sat in The Architect's chair and handed the keys to The Matrix (the augmented reality program, not the film franchise). I can see why this movie would be so divisive, considering it gives so much of itself away early on and needlessly complicates itself with a wonky timeline. Terminal overflows with confidence at every turn, from its ludicrous stylized lighting to its peak-Ritchie dialogue quirks to its Nolanesque fascination with the power of time to manipulate an audience.

At 90 minutes, Terminal never stops imagining itself to be the greatest achievement in film, and that allows for a compellingly brisk watch. At one point it's a Jarmuschian meditation on whether the joy of life is worth the price of death, at another it's practically a video game adaptation of The Game if Shrek were portrayed via full motion video and there was zero action. Seriously, what came first, the makeup or the casting of Mike Myers? Is his entire ensemble self-provided or did it come from the script? Did he ghostwrite this damn movie? Did Hideo Kojima?

If you like your movies pointed but pointless, an overdose on the idea that a series of photographs displayed concurrently at a rate that resembles actual motion is as much a delivery device for lucid dreams as any relatable reality, Terminal is your fucking jam. If you want a big idea, you're not going to get it. If the ending feels like the beginnings of a huge franchise here, sorry, Terminal isn't going to be Margot Robbie's John Wick. Instead, it's more like her Man on Fire as imagined by Harley Quinzel in a fever dream the first night after The Joker left her for dead for the first time. These are the sorts of huge swing-and-misses I think more people should be salivating over, not just because the miss part is wrong but because everyone involved with this stepped up to the plate and swung as hard as they could at every single pitch, unconcerned with whether making contact was the point.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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